The ups, downs, and occasional sideways bits of trying to be mortgage free

Well, alright, yesterday wasn't an NSD. Dame Cat was limping and grumpy when I tried to stroke her, so I took her to the vet and she had an abscess developing from a cat fight wound. That's the second one in two months, and it cost me $165 each time. I think it might be Kitten's doing: he's a year old now and he gets pretty feisty. I'm going to have to take out pet insurance.

In other medical news, Big Girl slammed her finger in a door last week and that's meant doctor's appointments to check it isn't fractured (it is not, but eight days later it's still very swollen and she'll lose the nail), and Mr E has a hospital procedure booked which our insurance will pick up but we're up for the $500 excess. He could do it under the public system, but it's not considered urgent so it'd be close to a year's waiting list. So there goes this month's margin. I feel like I post a version of this every month.

Household spends are staying nice and low, though. I'm about to go put a new loaf of bread into the oven, tonight's dinner is the fish pie which feels like a bonus meal since I didn't expect the fish to stretch that far, and the weather is finally nice enough to peg washing outside so hopefully the power bill will start to come down from now.

I'm in that part of the month between pays where I'm scouring YNAB to see if I can move any little bits of money over from the budget account to the mortgage, but I don't think I'd better. Patience, and all that.

Busy weekend coming up: both Mr E and I need some child-free time to get our stuff done so it'll be one of those where we tag-team a bit - that is, one of us entertains the kids/dog/does the housework while the other one does the solo stuff.

His solo stuff is building a new bookshelf, which I'm very much looking forward to. We pulled apart the old one so we could re-use the wood, meaning there's books stuffed into corners and on surfaces everywhere. The new one will be built specifically for the lounge room space, and be bigger, so it also means I can get rid of the extra bookshelf in my study, and maybe even the one in the breakfast room, and have a good declutter. Love a good declutter.

My solo stuff is less interesting, in that it's just extra working hours. Mr E suggested that to fit it all in, he'll take the girls grocery shopping instead of me doing it. This will inevitably mean he spends more than I would, so I'm torn. I can try making him a super detailed list and hoping for the best!

I did the green grocer and sent him off with a very strict list! We'll hope.

We also had a chat this morning about which categories "we" overspend in every month. Part of the issue is that Mr E doesn't see YNAB - I have the old version which doesn't have an app; you can synch it to Dropbox but that's clunky - so he just spends. It's all stuff that can be justified, he's not very extravagant, but he's removed from the actual numbers.

So today I sorted everything into costs-per-person. That is, instead of having a spends category, a hairdresser category, a clothing category, a category for each extra curricular, I split it into people and allotted us each a proportion. They're not equal, because if Mr E genuinely needs to spend more money on clothes than I do (due to office job), that shouldn't mean he gets less fritter money as a result. But it does mean that at the start of the month I can tell him how much he has overall to meet all his personal costs, and then he can (I hope) keep track of it from there. It's also quite an eye opener to see how much we each spend on personal upkeep!

TBH I thought of doing that a while ago but I thought it might look like I was making a point - he seemed amenable enough to the concept this morning, though. This is the thing about mortgage overpayment. If we were in debt, he'd be 100% on board with frugality, but it's not a road to anyone's happiness to be criticising the occasional bottle of Baileys for the sake of shaving a year off the mortgage.